A Daughter of the Middle Border | Page 5

most of my harangues. Sculpture, with him, was a religious faith,
and he defended it manfully and practiced it with skill and an industry
which was astounding.
Though a noble figure and universally admired, he had, like myself,
two very serious defects, he was addicted to frock coats and the habit of
lecturing! Although he did not go so far as to wear a plaid Windsor tie
with his "Prince Albert" coat (as I have been accused of doing), he
displayed something of the professor's zeal in his platform addresses. I
would demur against the plaid Windsor tie indictment if I dared to do
so, but a certain snapshot portrait taken by a South-side photographer
of that day (and still extant) forces me to painful confession--I had such
a tie, and I wore it with a frock coat. My social status is thus clearly
defined.
Taft's studio, which was on the top floor of the Athenæum Building on
Van Buren Street, had a section which he called "the morgue," for the
reason that it was littered with plaster duplicates of busts, arms, and
hands. This room, fitted up with shelf-like bunks, was filled nearly
every night with penniless young sculptors who camped in primitive
simplicity amid the grewsome discarded portraits of Cook County's
most illustrious citizens. Several of these roomers have since become
artists of wide renown, and I refrain from disclosing their names. No
doubt they will smile as they recall those nights amid their landlord's
cast-off handiwork.
Taft was an "easy mark" in those times, a shining hope to all the
indigent models, discouraged painters and other esthetic derelicts of the
Columbian Exposition. No artist suppliant ever knocked at his door
without getting a dollar, and some of them got twenty. For several
years Clarkson and I had him on our minds because of this gentle and
yielding disposition until at last we discovered that in one way or
another, in spite of a reckless prodigality, he prospered. The bread
which he cheerfully cast upon these unknown waters, almost always
returned (sometimes from another direction) in loaves at least as large
as biscuits. His fame steadily increased with his charity. I did not

understand the principle of his manner of life then, and I do not now.
By all the laws of my experience he should at this moment be in the
poorhouse, but he isn't--he is rich and honored and loved.
In sculpture he was, at this time a conservative, a worshiper of the
Greek, and it would seem that I became his counter-irritant, for my
demand for "A native art" kept him wholesomely stirred up. One by
one as the years passed he yielded esthetic positions which at first he
most stoutly held. He conceded that the Modern could not be entirely
expressed by the Ancient, that America might sometime grow to the
dignity of having an art of its own, and that in sculpture (as in painting
and architecture) new problems might arise. Even in his own work
(although he professed but one ideal, the Athenian) he came at last to
include the plastic value of the red man, and to find in the expression of
the Sioux or Omaha a certain sorrowful dignity which fell parallel with
his own grave temperament, for, despite his smiling face, his best work
remained somber, almost tragic in spirit.
Henry B. Fuller, who in The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani had shown
himself to be the finest literary craftsman in the West, became (a little
later) a leader in our group and a keen delight to us all. He was at this
time a small, brown-bearded man of thirty-five, whose quick humor,
keen insight and unfailing interest in all things literary made him a
caustic corrective of the bombast to which our local reviewers were
sadly liable. Although a merciless critic of Chicago, he was a native of
the city, and his comment on its life had to be confronted with such
equanimity as our self-elected social hierarchy could assume.
Elusive if not austere with strangers, Henry's laugh (a musical "ha ha")
was often heard among his friends. His face could be impassive not to
say repellent when approached by those in whom he took no interest,
and there were large numbers of his fellow citizens for whom the
author of Pensieri-Vani had only contempt. Strange to say, he became
my most intimate friend and confidant--antithetic pair!
Eugene Field, his direct opposite, and the most distinguished member
of "the journalistic gang," took very little interest in the doings of "the
Bunnies" and few of them knew him, but I often visited him in his

home on the North Side, and greatly enjoyed his solemn-faced humor.
He was a singular character, as improvident as Lorado but in a far
different way.
I recall